Trotsky Redux

...In 1964 he was himself deposed...

...arrived at the conclusion that Trotsky and his son, Lev Lvovich Sedov, were innocent...

...All their lives they showed no interest in improving the lot of the toilers...

...How can they trust each other knowing full well that while Stalin was alive each one among them would have been happy to sacrifice everything to preserve his own power and position...

...Trotsky started by excoriating the collective leadership of Khrushchev, Nikolai A. Bulganin, Anastas I. Mikoyan and Stalin'sother successors: "These are the nonentities who dare to demand from Russian workers and peasants unimaginable sacrifices in the struggle for a great cause...

...One such statement that may be missing in Moscow was made by Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova, shortly after Khrushchev's secret speech was leaked to the West in 1956...

...A year later, in 1957, Khrushchev broke up the collective leadership and removed many of his comrades-in-arms...

...Idealism was always the characteristic and the strength of youth...

...At the Moscow purge trials in the late 1930s, the absent Trotsky was actually the chief defendant...

...She further maintained that "the task of overthrowing Stalinism is the task of the Russian workers and peasants...

...Everything you were taught about Trotsky since that time is vile slander...

...However, at that time Stalin and his clique put their stakes on the peasants and fought this plan...

...The following year three developments advanced the re-evaluation process...

...Then the Central Lenin Museum quietly added photographs of Trotsky, along with those of other disgraced leaders of the past, to its permanent exhibition...

...It began with permission finally being given to stage Mikhail Shatrov's The Brest Peace, written in 1962...

...The rulers of Russia are in a dilemma—which lies to admit and which lies to retain intact...

...They know that during the reign of the Leader [Stalin] all the heroic figures of the proletarian revolution were done away with...

...Yet will the new textbooks being prepared be more truthful than the old ones...

...Still, Trotsky's fiercely loyal wife would surely welcome his long overdue restoration from the musorny yashchik istorii —the "garbage can of history," to which he relegated his own opponents in October 1917...

...But the Stalinist stand on Trotsky remained the official one until three years ago, when a remarkable re-evaluation of his role in Soviet history got under way...

...Last month also marked the latest stage in the Soviet Union's all but formal rehabilitation of Trotsky during the era of glasnost: For the first time, the Soviet press published large excerpts from the diaries written between 1935-40 by the Bolshevik leader who made the October Revolution with Lenin...

...Trotsky continued, was "a natural consequence of the entire period after the death of Lenin and the banishment of Trotsky...

...Produced by the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow, it became the sensation of the 1987 season...

...Trotsky also fought against the system of slave labor in the concentration camps...

...From my distant exile where I have already spent so many years, I find it difficult to estimate the number of people in Russia who would believe the accusations against Trotsky and others...

...Nevertheless, as the Soviet Union struggles to come to terms with Communism's failure, much of her criticism remains surprisingly relevant...

...How long will they hold on under the pressure of great events...

...Robert V. Daniels, one of a handful of American Soviet affairs specialists who have participated in several recent international conferences on the early Soviet period, reports that this increasingly objective treatment of Trotsky has been manifest in those forums as well...

...Abroad no one believes any longer in the vile slander that Trotsky allegedly was linked with Fascists, foreign powers, espionage, and the like...

...Ten scholars from the USSR joined in the Aberdeen discussion of "Leon Trotsky After Fifty Years...

...This commission, after hearing the testimony of Trotsky and others, and carefully examining all the accusations...

...In 1989 Molodoy Kommunist, organ of the Young Communist League, reprinted Trotsky's 1923 series of articles entitled "The New Course," breaking a 60-year ban on the publication of his works...

...It therefore appears likely that Trotsky will be legally exonerated, and that not only most of his writings but also many previously suppressed statements of his adherents will be made available...

...Trotsky's widow concluded with the prediction that "the decayed Stalinist oligarchy" would not be saved by its attempt to assume the mantle of Lenin...

...After losing out completely by 1927 to Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Joseph Stalin, Trotsky was portrayed in the USSR as the devil incarnate...

...Trotsky sharply condemned this method, as well as forced collectivizaion of the peasants accompanied by savage repressions, mass deportations and arrests, which resulted in the general famine in the Ukraine and the death of millions of peasants...

...First, economist Otto Latsis, arguing that even if Trotsky's views were still anathema he had committed no crimes, urged his legal rehabilitation and the release of bis writings for scholarly research...

...Next, Pravda published an article by senior Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov describing Trotsky's close ties with Lenin as Commissar of War and asserting that Stalin ordered his ousted rival's assassination—the first such admission in the Soviet press...

...Only after Trotsky was exiled in 1928 to Alma-Ata [in Kazakhstan], and after the opposition was suppressed, did Stalin begin the industrialization of the country...

...Nikita S. Khrushchev delivered a partial condemnation of Stalin in his famous secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956...

...Unfortunately, the quasi-Stalinist regime of Leonid I. Brezhnev and his short-lived successors, Yuri V. Andropov and Konstantin U. Chernenko, lasted for two more decades...

...Mme...

...In fact, she probably would be among those critics of Gorbachev who today accuse him of betraying Lenin and embarking on the capitalist road...

...Even a weak blow to the myth they themselves created, even a partial unmasking of the falsehood on which their rule is based, cannot but sow doubts and discord among the new, growing generation...

...Gene Sosin, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, retired in 1985 from Radio Liberty, where he was a program executive for more than three decades...

...His unmasking and condemnation of all these evildoings of Stalin, and finally his eloquent response to the sham Moscow trials, enraged the Stalinist clique, which decided to get rid of Trotsky...

...Young people were taught history which was thoroughly permeated with lies...

...The cult of Stalin, Mme...

...And now the liberal weekly Moscow News has printed excerpts from his diaries, with more promised in Znamya, the magazine of the Soviet Writers' Union...

...Referring to the inquiry into the validity of the accusations against her husband, Mme...

...But they are wrong...

...Turning to the Orwellian falsification of events, Mme...

...She recorded it in Mexico City for broadcast by Radio Liberty and the English translation I have kept in my files could indeed be the sole copy extant...

...Addressed, "in the first place, to the young people in Soviet Russia"—some of whom are today in positions of influence—her message of course has a distinctly Trotskyist perspective...

...The play depicts Trotsky, who opposed the BrestLitovsk treaty, as Lenin's intellectual equal, albeit his moral inferior...

...they were interested only in holding on to power and to all the privileges that go with power...

...Although Stalin had him exiled in 1929, he continued to attack his principal ideological enemy as the betrayer of the Revolution from abroad...

...But serious changes in the balance of social power will be required before you, young people, will be able to uncover historical truth...

...I am convinced that the doubts will crush the hard convictions, and that youth will not abandon its search for truth until it will find all the truth.Woe then unto the false leaders...

...in 1940, on Stalin's orders, he was murdered in Mexico City...

...Trotsky declared: "I realize with bitterness that many of my listeners were brought up completely in a Stalinist spirit...

...They believe that nowhere in the world are there any forces that might threaten them...

...The plan for the industrialization of the country was worked out by Trotsky...

...He did it in his own manner, with unheard of cruelty and at the cost of tremendous sacrifices on the part of the population...

...Even the grains of truth the rulers were forced to admit now make impossible the use of old history textbooks...

...Events unfold slowly, but it is unlikely that this leadership will last long...

...Trotsky said in her 1956 broadcast: "It is unlikely that news of the [1937-38] commission that investigated the Moscow trials, chaired by John Dewey, the noted American philosopher, has reached you...

...Natalia Sedova was 74 at the time of hermessage to Russia...

...Those who participated in the Revolution and went through its first heroic stages could not believe those lies...

...The conferences were held in Moscow, West Germany and, just last month, in Scotland at the University of Aberdeen...

...In August, too, the Kremlin announced that Mikhail S. Gorbachev's regime had repudiated all of Stalin's crimes against Soviet citizens...

...She did not live to witness the overthrow of Stalinism, and would no doubt have been astounded to see it occur as part of an evolutionary process initiated by the Communist leadership itself, rather than by a revolt of the masses...

...It seems clear, says Daniels, that "Trotsky has already been rehabilitated de facto by Soviet historians...

...Russia's present rulers look into the future with some confidence...